There are many different situations in which the contents in a receptacle, such as a bottle, are dispensed according to a schedule and it is desirable to maintain a log to see if the dispensing schedule was adhered to. One such setting is the dispensing of medication from a bottle.
The majority of medicines and drugs require administration in a series of doses at specific times over a period of time for increased effectiveness. Outside of a hospital or clinic setting, this usually requires the patient or an individual caring for the patient to be responsible for keeping track of the medication in question. However, a frequent problem is that the patient or the individual caring for the patient errs in the administration of the medicine. Patients may forget to take a dose of their medication, be tardy in taking a dose, or forget entirely to take a dose and/or take a second dose too soon, etc.
In addition, with some drugs, such as controlled substances (e.g., oxycodone), there is a risk that patient may not follow the dosage instructions as a result of a drug addiction and/or there is even a risk that a patient may illegally sell and distribute some of the pills and then subsequently allege that the pills are misplaced, lost, or stolen, etc.
A number of approaches to solving the above problems have been proposed and embodied in different devices. In particular, there are a number of devices that include a pill case or box with a timer or alarm to alert the patient that a certain time period has passed and that the medication should be taken. Also, these simple alarms provide no means to ensure or check compliance with administration of the medication. Moreover, if the patient fails to take the medication at the prescribed time, the patient is likely to fail to reset the timer or alarm.
In addition, existing products are not particularly suited to handle different sized and different shaped pills but instead, typically require a new entire dispensing device for different categories of pills. This is costly and also overly complex.
In addition, the traditional dispensing devices are configured to work only with a bottle of a single type. As will be readily appreciated, medicine bottles comes in many different sizes based in part on the size of pills themselves and/or the quantity of the pills that are contained in the bottle. Thus, when the dispensing device is incorporated into the cap, the device can only mate with a single bottle and if additional prescriptions are obtained that have different bottle sizes, the user would be unable to use the dispensing device with those other bottles. There is therefore a need for a medication dispensing device that is configured to mate with different sized bottles.